How Do You want Scientists to be Perceived
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Slides for a April 1 plenary talk at the International Society for Biosafety Research talk in Tarragona, Spain, April 1, 2019. The talk focuses on the idea of strategic science communication in the context of genetic engineering. It emphasizes the importance of setting behavioral goals and then figuring out what types of communication objectives could ethically help you reach these goals over time. It further argued that public engagement activities should be understood as tactics meant to foster cognitive engagement and thus the formation of meaningful beliefs. The primary emphasis of the talk was on choosing communication tactics that have the potential to foster beliefs about scientists' warmth, openness, value similarity, honesty, and competence.
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How Do You want Scientists to be Perceived
- 1. How Do You Want to Be Perceived? A Perspective from Strategic Science Communication Research This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF, Grant AISL 1421214-1421723. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF. Dr. John C. Besley, Ellis N. Brandt Professor
- 2. About me …
- 3. About me … Specific scientific issues Overall views about science Scientists views about the public
- 4. The first question of strategic communication: What is your behavioral goal? My answer: I would like people to see scientists as the smart friend that they turn to when they’re faced with difficult questions
- 5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Canada (n = 573) USA (n = 516) Ensuring policy makers use scientific evidence Ensuring [Canadian/our] culture values science Helping people use science to make better personal decisions Fulfilling a duty to society Strengthening my own professional reputation Help ensuring adequate funding for science USA (2018) and Canadian (2017) Scientists Prioritization of Select Goals for Face-to-Face Public Engagement … behavioral goals? Based on 2012-2017 NSERC sample and AAU random sample
- 6. How do I think communication happens? Most meaningful communication effects are cumulative and occur over the long-term
- 7. About science knowledge as a communication objective … “Available research does not support the claim that increasing science literacy will lead to appreciably greater support for science in general.” (or specific policies)
- 8. About knowledge as a communication objective …
- 11. A mea culpa … (… on behalf of the science communication community for suggesting that public engagement is an alternative to the deficit model) Released, October 2016
- 12. Engagement activities are tactics (hope is to promote cognitive engagement; engagement activities should not be seen as communication objectives) Face-to-face Direct w/policy-makers Online Mediated
- 14. Communication objectives come from cognitive engagement I want people to believe scientists and science are …
- 15. But that doesn’t just happen … Science? 50% Warmth? 5% Honesty? 10% Listening? 15% ? 10% ? 10% If you only have space for 600 words or 60 minutes where should you focus? Where does framing fit?
- 16. Communication Objectives RelationalBeliefsBehavioralBeliefs Behavioral GoalEngagement Tactics What will you do or say? How will you do or say it? Who will do or say it? When and where?
- 17. 4.16 4.11 3.77 3.64 3.73 3.72 3.47 3.40 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 General Survey (~n = 293) GE Survey (~n = 312) Competence (5 variable scale) Integrity (8 variable scale) Warmth (5 variable scale) Openness (8 variables) How do you pick communication objectives? Ongoing ‘trust’ project suggests beliefs about scientists integrity, warmth, and openness are … middling at best (And non-competence trust seems to drive GE acceptance in model)
- 18. The flip side … And not experience scientists and science as …
- 19. What I really worry about … Funny to you group and/or cathartic Equal effective communication
- 20. What I really worry about …
- 21. What I really worry about …
- 22. What I really worry about …
- 25. Some final context …
- 26. Three takeaways … There are no silver bullets Not everyone is reachable It takes a community This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF, Grant AISL 1421214-1421723. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the NSF.
- 27. Communication Objectives RelationalBeliefsBehavioralBeliefs Behavioral GoalEngagement Tactics What will you do or say? How will you do or say it? Who will do or say it? When and where?
Notes de l'éditeur
- Thank you for inviting me to talk with you today. I’m looking forward to sharing some of what I’ve learned studying public opinion about science and science communication in the last couple of decades.
- I want to start just by giving you a little bit of context about me. I have an undergraduate degree in journalism and worked a little bit as a journalist but decided to go back to get a masters in environmental policy. I was working at Environment Canada on international environmental policy and was getting a little frustrated because I felt like we had some good policy ideas but that no one was interested in trying them. I decided to do a PhD at Cornell hoping to study why people didn’t want all the cool things that environmental policy could provide. That’s when I learned about how university funding works and there wasn’t a ton of money for straight environmental communication research. At that time, Cornell however had funding for a lot of agricultural biotechnology research and I was learning that theory and methods needed to study public opinion are shared across issues. I therefore started working with Jim Shanahan and some others associated with the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program II (ABSPII) on some public opinion work. Eventually I graduated and took my first faculty gig at the University South Carolina in the journalism and mass communications school and continued to study risk communication on various issues including genetic engineering but also nuclear energy, hydrogen energy, and nanotechnology. These were all topics where there was funding and interest and a I think a lot of researchers like me moved away from genetic engineering in search of research funds. The big change that’s important here happened in 2012 when MSU asked me to become the “Ellis N. Brandt Endowed Chair in Public Relations.” It was great to be offered an endowed chair position but, until that point, I hadn’t really thought of myself as being someone who studied public relations or strategic communication. I was wrong. They were right. And it’s really focused my thinking about the research I want to do and what constitutes effective communication.
- These days I typically study some combination of three different things. I still do a fair amount of work focused on how people perceive specific technologies and am increasingly turning back to looking at genetically engineered food. I am particularly interested in the role that perceptions of scientists and the communication choices they make can affect views about technologies. In recent years, I’ve also been working on overall attitudes about science and scientists in the context of a report I write for the US National Science Board every two years. Finally, since I moved to Michigan State, my colleague Anthony Dudo and I have gotten really interested in scientists’ views about communication in the context of trying to help people like science communication trainers improve the quality of science communication. This in turn has forced me to dive into the strategic communication literature to really think about what we mean when we say effective communication.
- I think one good way to think about effective communication to insist on being clear about what you want to happen because of the resources – the time and -- you put into communication. When I do things like train or survey scientists I know that a good portion will tell me that their goal is to get people to understand something about their area of research or the scientific process. My question—and the question that strategic communicators should always—is whether you would be happy if people just learned that information and did nothing else. My sense is that that the answer is almost always no. I think most scientists would like to see the potential for behavior change as a result of their research and communication efforts.
- Beyond talking to scientists, a big reason I think scientists want to change behavior is because we have asked more than 10,000 scientists to rate a set of goals in surveys and they typically give the goals we ask about high scores. These are the results of two of the most recent projects and what we see is that scientists especially prioritize getting policy makers to use evidence but other goals such as getting individuals to make better decisions also score highly. The problem with goals – and one way you know you’re talking about a behavioral goal – is that these types of goals can’t be achieved directly Instead, you need to identify what might be called intermediate communication objectives that can increase the odds of fostering the behaviors you want.
- Trust as a willingness to be vulnerable Legitimacy as a willingness to accept decisions that you may not support
- More broadly, I think most meaningful communication objectives happen as the result of long-term exposure and engagement with consistent messages. I think the dominant model of attitudes associated with planned behaviors is that people develop beliefs and feelings about the world over time and then draw on them when they’re able and motivated to do so.
- Science knowledge in this way of thinking is a potential communication objective that could occur as a result of exposure and attention to a message or experience. And it sometimes does. I am confident that the you have heard this before but the reason that communication is so hard is that you knowledge often doesn’t seem to be strongly associated with people’s attitudes or behaviors. It’s true for science. It’s true for health. It’s true for politics and lots of other important areas.
- And it’s not that there’s no relationship. Studies like this one have shown that there’s a small relationship between believing specific types of knowledge and both risk perceptions and overall support for the technology …
- And we’ve found something similar in our work such as this study with my colleague Katherine McComas at Cornell from 2014 that look at GE late blight technology The study found that the biggest statistical correlates of support for late blight were not science knowledge or GE familiarity but beliefs about benefits and beliefs that GE scientists were willing to listen and respectful of others – a variable sometimes call procedural fairness.
- What’s more, these types of findings specifically in the area of genetic engineering are consistent with other areas according to a great meta-analysis that Nick Allum and some colleagues did about a decade ago. And again, I know many of you are aware that science knowledge isn’t the answer to all communication problems …
- What I think show is how why it’s really hard to expect knowledge campaigns to work …
- What I think one problem has been is that social scientists like me have been great at telling you that knowledge doesn’t work very well to change attitudes but we haven’t been as good about talking about what does. What you often hear is that the alternative to filling deficits in people’s knowledge is to engage the public. I’m a fan of the idea of public engagement activities but I want to briefly argue that they need to be understood as communication tactics and not as a communication objective. I’ll then argue that thinking about communication objectives means thinking seriously about potential communication objectives beyond knowledge that we can achieve through communication.
- First, when I use the term engagement I mean any type of communication activity that has the potential to get people to pay attention. I mean communication that is cognitively engaging. I think these activities can be mediated, online, face-to-face, and with all kinds of different stakeholders.
- In other words, I think the think that makes public engagement activities special is that they’re designed to foster substantive new beliefs and not simply to get people to react heuristically or automatically in the short term. The idea of two types of processing is common in the social sciences and has been the subject of many popular and academic books, not the least of which is Nobel Prize winning Daniel Kahnman. Much of the focus in popular books such as Kahneman and Malcolm Gladwell’s blink has been on heuristic or peripheral processing. But I think engagement-focused communication is designed to appeal to our systematic processing because it seems more ethical and because it’s what matters in the long-run.
- Which brings us to my main point. I think that we need to think about what other communication objectives we can achieve beyond knowledge. Most of my own work has focused on the area of perceived fairness and trust but I would argue those terms are too general for true strategic communication planning. Instead, I think we need to think more granularly about the components of trust and think about the degree to which our communication efforts make use seem warm and caring, open and willing to listen, similar to others in terms of values, honest, and competent. These are beliefs are all beliefs a person can hold and also beliefs that research has shown have the potential to shape views about topics such as genetic engineering. These aren’t the only beliefs you might prioritize as objectives – I’ve grayed out some other ones that I think we’ll talk about at a symposium tomorrow – but they’re the ones I want to emphasize today.
- The reason I emphasize being specific about communication objectives is because you can’t just hope that you communicate warmth, openness, similarity, honesty, and competence. Prioritizing most communication objectives means taking some time to make sure that you’re doing and saying things that have the potential to foster the relevant believes.
- For me, engagement tactics are what you do to foster the communication objectives that you hope will increase the odds of someone doing the behavior you hope to see. What you say and do are obvious aspects of tactics but so too are choices about how you say or do something, who says or does something, and the context within which something is said or done.
- A key question you should be asking yourself is how do you pick among a range of possible communication objectives. The answer is research and theory. That’s what social science does best. For example, I have an ongoing project where we’re trying to develop better measures for trust-related objectives. As part of that project, we did a survey where we asked people a whole series of questions about how they saw scientists with half the respondents getting a survey where they were asked about science in general and the other half asked about scientists focused on genetically engineered food. What we found is that people think both types of scientists are quite competent giving them an average competence score above 4 on a 5-point scale. But that’s one aspect of trust: You wouldn’t hire a plumber if you didn’t think they could fix your pipes. On the other hand scientists don’t do very well on the other trust-related beliefs. They score middling on integrity and warmth and even work on openness or a willingness to listen. When I see something like this it suggests to me that while scientists need to think more about how they’re perceived when they consider and design engagement activities. I especially worry about this because my understanding of the research suggests that potential objectives such as warmth, integrity, and openness are more closely tied to support than variables such as knowledge.
- And when I’m watching some of the debates around topics such as GMOs, what a really worry about are things that make scientists seem untruthfully cold, closed, dissimilar or weird. I’m sure some scientists are all of these things but most scientists I know care deeply about their communities, are open to others, have deep integrity, and have the normal range of weirdness.
- I feel like I understand that many of us are frustrated with what we see in our political and social systems but the thing about being strategic is that it suggests you need to recognize that your decisions about how you respond to frustration of consequences.
- I worry that a lot of the ways we talk about people who oppose technologies such as genetic engineering are simply stupid or dishonest rather than fellow citizens who are probably doing their best to get through the day.
- And I often wonder whether these types of messages might have some use as forms of dark humor that help us cope. The problem is that I doubt we’re the only ones who see the type of mocking content that regularly shows up in my Facebook, Twitter, and Instgram feeds and, even if we were, I worry that it might shape how we talk to others or design our communication campaigns.
- In other words, how can we honestly say we’re trying to engage others as fellow citizens if we’re deriding or making fun of our fellow citizens at our cocktail parties, scientific meetings, and in our online forums.
- To finish out I want to highlight the work of a former Ph.D. student who has tested the effect of how people might respond to the style of things like an aggressive blog about genetic engineering. The core answer is that it’s not good. An aggressive, attacking style can drive down perceived quality of content and how scientists are perceived..
- She’s done a number of studies and we’ve yet to show that being aggressive is useful for expanding support for science beyond people who already support science.
- This is my second last slide and I want to use it to point out that I am very sympathetic to concerns about people’s misplaced worry about genetic engineering. However, please know that it’s not just happening to you. While overall views and knowledge about science seems to be stable, people seem to be a little more worried about all kinds of environmental and technological issues right now. Note that in these two graphs, concern about a whole range of things move together over time. To me, these underline why factors such as science knowledge may not have much impact. My sense is that people are struggling to make good choices in a complex world and the easiest thing to do be a little wary about everything.
- In the end, I don’t think there are any quick fixes. I think we need to be more strategic about how our communication choices might, over time, affect some of the people that aren’t already for our against us. This also means recognizing that there are people we won’t reach while also remembering that how the people we do want to reach may be watching to see how we treat others. And finally, I can’t emphasize enough that I don’t think it’s going to work if most us are trying hard to respect others while others are venting their frustration. By and large, I think people think of scientific community as a group such that we need to recognize that our choices don’t just affect how we’re perceived but it can also affect overall perceptions.